Foregone Feminism
One of the tensions that I try to address in Big Feelings is how feminist politics shows up in the music of contemporary indie bands that feel political, even if their music doesn’t deal directly in political content. In some ways, it is easier to find overt references to queer life in the music of Jay Som, boygenius, and Vagabon, for instance, than it is references to feminism as a fight for political change. But of course, it’s non-intuitive, feeling with the kinds of queer life presented in this music, to imagine being a queer woman and also not being a feminist; the viewpoints are more easily linked than distanced. Meanwhile, artists like Soccer Mommy have at times downplayed the suggestion that feminist politics affects her songwriting or musical process, while she has also raised money for abortion funds and aligned with progressive political candidates.
In other words, this music feels informed by feminist politics and oriented towards feminist fans, even when direct references to political viewpoints are difficult to discern in the lyrics themselves, even when the artist prefers not to emphasize them. That’s why I’ve used affect theory as a way to analyze how feminist feelings, moods, or vibes show up sonically in music that may seem apolitical on the surface. How is it that the way that a certain performer presents on stage, or the harmonic language of their music, or the references to astrology (or, or, or) communicates a feminist orientation that attracts a certain kind of listener, without needing to name the worldview that’s held in common? Affect helps us to think through that problem.
I’ve talked about affect at length elsewhere, so I won’t belabor the point here. But one question I haven’t dealt with specifically is what kind of feminism tends to present itself in this type of contemporary indie music. Definitively distinct from the dominant popular and postfeminist models offered by artists like Taylor Swift, artists like Indigo De Souza and SASAMI refuse performances of resilience and overcoming in favor of music that lets feelings be what they are—even if negative. This is part of why they are consistently associated with “sad girl” internet cultures, despite repeated disavowals on the part of artists. Nevertheless, if the riot grrrl movement is associated with the third-wave, the constitutive role that interlet cultures play in music discourse today would suggest that whatever Big Feelings is, it exists as a part of this fourth (or fifth) wave umbrella.
That being said, in the book I endeavor to distance Big Feelings from the sad girl archetype for a variety of reasons that I won’t get into here. Whether or not the kind of feminism I hear in Big Feelings is even coherent, what I’m interested in is how it might be communicated between listener and artist—what kinds of wavelengths are taken to be in common between these groups, even as music (and all cultural production) continues to play a role in structuring listener viewpoints in the first place.
I’m still working on this, but the closest that I’ve been able to get to something that feels right so far is what I would call a kind of “foregone” feminism, taken to mean both that its premises are or should be foregone conclusions, and simultaneously an awareness on the part of feminists just how thoroughly efforts to achieve the widespread social realization of these premises has continuously failed, may well continue to fail, at least as long as capitalism remains dominant in the world. In other words, foregone feminism accepts as default both the need for feminism and the failure of feminist social change, instead focusing on ways to strive for joy in a world out of which we can’t see a way.
I’m not suggesting necessarily that this is how Sophie Allison or Michelle Zauner understand feminism. That’s necessary to talk about, and others have asked those kinds of questions—I don’t, in this project, for a few reasons, including the fact that asking a woman rock musician how she feels about feminism can still be fraught because of the ways that such questions have shown up in the popular music press in the past. Instead, foregone feminism is a phrase that tries to organize the kinds of responses that I’ve heard from listeners, from fans of this music who recognize that their social orientations in the world play a big role in informing their fandom.
The dominant affect in foregone feminism is not revolutionary but one of exhaustion: I don’t hear nihilism or apathy when I talk to young people, but I do hear a kind of burnout that seems to know already bone deep how broken the world is, one that fears the fatal bills the ruling class has incurred might well come due during their lifetimes. They are chronically afraid—and not irrationally—that the planet will become inhospitable before they’re old. How to fight for gender equality in such a context? Easier to know and perhaps more affectively urgent is how we can be here for our friends with what time is left.
